Last night we hosted our first Movie Night in our home for the English conversation students that Anya and I work with. Paula baked some brownies and prepared a vegetable tray with dip, so we started off with some tasty treats to help everyone feel comfortable. Then we settled into the living room for our premiere.
I had wanted to open with the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I couldn’t find a copy, so we watched Crash. It was a risk since I had never seen the film, but Anya had, and my son Nicholas had highly recommended it to me some time ago. The risk paid off: everyone liked the film, and Anya moved us immediately into an interesting and significant discussion when it ended. (more…)
In the previous post I mentioned Dance Dance Revolution and posted a picture of Paula, Janka, and Miska dancing. But it’s difficult to capture the excitement and beauty of their abilities in a snapshot. Fortunately, a few weeks ago Petra and Anya secretly made videos of Paula throwing herself wholeheartedly into DDR. I’ve seen clips of these videos, and I have to say that they possess high entertainment value.
Sadly and inexplicably, Paula applied some sort of pressure to persuade Petra and Anya not to give these videos to me so that I could post them here for you to enjoy. This is just criminal.
I know you agree – you should be allowed to see and enjoy the wonder of the Dancing Babka. So please use the comment section to make an appeal to Paula to allow the publication of her masterpiece.
Every Sunday evening we have a group of Slovaks and Americans who meet at our house to go through a video class from Third Millennium Ministries. The study is so intense that after 90 minutes of it we have to unwind a bit. The picture below shows Janka, Miska, and Paula playing Dance Dance Revolution. I’d have to say these three are the champs. But lest you think our cultural standards have fallen, behind them Ethan and Anya were locked in a vicious chess match. And it was a chilly night, so Petra made some hot spiced wine (varene vino) for us to sip on the terrace….
Saturday our family, Gina, and Ryan caught a train to Vienna and made our way to the Albertina museum (across from the opera house and Cafe Mozart) for an exhibition of a few hundred drawings and paintings by Van Gogh. The picture below shows Paula, Gina, Kristian, and Ryan – and a cast of thousands – standing in line. The door in the background is the entrance. Once you get through that door, there is a room with another line to wait in. When you finish waiting in that room, you go into another room with a long line in front of the ticket desk. Lots of waiting – but well, well worth it.
… to find a cuter baby than my grandson Henrik.
It can’t be done, as these pictures make abundantly clear.
The Thin Red Line is very different from To End All Wars. Both explore some complex aspects of humanity under the extreme stresses of war, but they ask different questions in different ways. The Thin Red Line delves into some of the more miserable aspects of human nature – or perhaps even the unhuman aspects of human nature. It shows how absurd we can be, how viscious and how noble – the same person, one moment like an animal, the next like a god. That’s mysterious.
Movies liks this often make me wonder what I would be like in similar situations. I hope I never find out.
You can see a photo essay on Ethan’s morning activity over at Petra’s blog. I think Karen, Anya, and other haters of spiders will be pleased….
To End All Wars is set in a Japanese POW camp in Thailand from 1942 – 1945. It shows the confrontation not only of two cultures, but of different individual convictions, in the face of death and hopelessness – or at least the temptation to hopelessness. Of course, it gets down to some of the ultimate questions about life. And it deals with them quite well.
I was intrigued by the need some of the men had to create a school within their camp, where they discussed Plato and learned Shakespeare, and they studied the Scriptures. They also learned and performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (I think) on some wretched instruments. The ideas and the beauty transformed many of the men, and the changes in them affected their captors.
A movie to talk about – and perhaps even to be changed by…
You have to have some interest in philosophical questions and discussion in order to enjoy Waking Life – and I think you need to be willing to listen to a lot of well-articulated nonsense.
The movie was originally filmed as live action, then painted over in order to give its unusual visual effect. And the effect is appropriate, since the protagonist spends the entire film trying to wake up from a dream – in fact, he keeps waking up within his dream, only to find out that he is still dreaming. As he wanders through the dream he meets different characters who wax philosophical. And it seemed to me that even though their statements were all brief, they captured the essence (without too much caricature) of the system of thought they represented, whether it was existentialism or anarchism (if that’s the word, which I doubt). The movie is a smorgasbord, then, of discussion topics.
